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INTRODUCTION
The Discipline and
Practice of Qualitative Research
Norman K. Denzin and Yvonna S. Lincoln
W riting about scientific research,
including qualitative research, from
the vantage point of the colonized,
a position that she chooses to privilege, Linda
Tuhiwai Smith (1999) states that “the term
‘research’ is inextricably linked to European
imperialism and colonialism.” She continues,
“The word itself is probably one of the dirtiest
words in the indigenous world’s vocabulary. . . . It
is implicated in the worst excesses of colonial-
ism,” with the ways in which “knowledge about
indigenous peoples was collected, classified, and
then represented back to the West” (p. 1). This
dirty word stirs up anger, silence, distrust. “It is
so powerful that indigenous people even write
poetry about research” (p. 1). It is one of colonial-
ism’s most sordid legacies.
Sadly, qualitative research, in many if not
all of its forms (observation, participation, inter-
viewing, ethnography), serves as a metaphor for
colonial knowledge, for power, and for truth. The
metaphor works this way. Research, quantitative
Authors’ Note. We are grateful to many who have helped with this chapter, including Egon Guba, Mitch Allen, David Monje, and
Katherine E. Ryan.
and qualitative, is scientific. Research provides
the foundation for reports about and represen-
tations of “the Other.” In the colonial context,
research becomes an objective way of represent-
ing the dark-skinned Other to the white world.
Colonizing nations relied on the human dis-
ciplines, especially sociology and anthropology,
to produce knowledge about strange and foreign
worlds. This close involvement with the colonial
project contributed, in significant ways, to quali-
tative research’s long and anguished history, to its
becoming a dirty word (for reviews, see in this
volume Foley & Valenzuela, Chapter 9; Tedlock,
Chapter 18). In sociology, the work of the
“Chicago school” in the 1920s and 1930s estab-
lished the importance of qualitative inquiry for
the study of human group life. In anthropology
during the same period, the discipline-defining
studies of Boas, Mead, Benedict, Bateson, Evans-
Pritchard, Radcliffe-Brown, and Malinowski
charted the outlines of the fieldwork method (see
Gupta & Ferguson, 1997; Stocking, 1986, 1989).
2– 1
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The agenda was clear-cut: The observer went to
a foreign setting to study the culture, customs, and
habits of another human group. Often this was a
group that stood in the way of white settlers.Ethno-
graphic reports of these groups where incorporated
into colonizing strategies, ways of controlling the
foreign, deviant, or troublesome Other. Soon quali-
tative research would be employed in other social
and behavioral science disciplines, including
education (especially the work of Dewey), history,
political science, business, medicine, nursing,
social work, and communications (for criticisms of
this tradition, see Smith, 1999; Vidich & Lyman,
2000; see also Rosaldo 1989, pp. 25–45; Tedlock,
Chapter 18, this volume).
By the 1960s, battle lines were drawn within
the quantitative and qualitative camps. Quanti-
tative scholars relegated qualitative research to
a subordinate status in the scientific arena. In
response, qualitative researchers extolled the
humanistic virtues of their subjective, inter-
pretive approach to the study of human group
life. In the meantime, indigenous peoples found
themselves subjected to the indignities of both
approaches, as each methodology was used in
the name of colonizing powers (see Battiste,
2000; Semali & Kincheloe, 1999).
Vidich and Lyman (1994, 2000) have charted
many key features of this painful history. In their
now-classic analysis they note, with some irony,
that qualitative research in sociology and anthro-
pology was “born out of concern to understand
the ‘other’” (Vidich & Lyman, 2000, p. 38).
Furthermore, this “other” was the exotic Other, a
primitive, nonwhite person from a foreign culture
judged to be less civilized than ours. Of course,
there were colonialists long before there were
anthropologists and ethnographers. Nonetheless,
there would be no colonial, and now no neocolo-
nial, history were it not for this investigative
mentality that turned the dark-skinned Other
into the object of the ethnographer’s gaze. From
the very beginning, qualitative research was
implicated in a racist project.1
In this introductory chapter, we define the
field of qualitative research, then navigate, chart,
and review the history of qualitative research
in the human disciplines. This will allow us to
locate this volume and its contents within their
historical moments. (These historical moments
are somewhat artificial; they are socially con-
structed,quasi-historical,and overlapping conven-
tions. Nevertheless, they permit a “performance”
of developing ideas. They also facilitate an increas-
ing sensitivity to and sophistication about the
pitfalls and promises of ethnography and qualita-
tive research.) We also present a conceptual frame-
work for reading the qualitative research act as
a multicultural,gendered process and then provide
a brief introduction to the chapters that follow.
Returning to the observations of Vidich and Lyman
as well as those of hooks, we conclude with a brief
discussion of qualitative research and critical
race theory (see also Ladson-Billings & Donnor,
Chapter 11, this volume). We also discuss the
threats to qualitative, human subject research from
the methodological conservatism movement men-
tioned briefly in our preface.As we note in the pref-
ace, we use the metaphor of the bridge to structure
what follows. This volume is intended to serve as
a bridge connecting historical moments, politics,
the decolonization project, research methods, par-
adigms, and communities of interpretive scholars.
2 DEFINITIONAL ISSUES
Qualitative research is a field of inquiry in its
own right. It crosscuts disciplines, fields, and
subject matters.2 A complex, interconnected
family of terms, concepts, and assumptions sur-
round the term qualitative research. These include
the traditions associated with foundationalism,
positivism, postfoundationalism, postpositivism,
poststructuralism, and the many qualitative
research perspectives, and/or methods connected
to cultural and interpretive studies (the chapters
in Part II take up these paradigms).3 There are
separate and detailed literatures on the many
methods and approaches that fall under the cate-
gory of qualitative research, such as case study,
politics and ethics, participatory inquiry, inter-
viewing, participant observation, visual methods,
and interpretive analysis.
In North America, qualitative research oper-
ates in a complex historical field that crosscuts at
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least eight historical moments. (We discuss these
moments in detail below.) These moments over-
lap and simultaneously operate in the present.4
We define them as the traditional (1900–1950);
the modernist, or golden age (1950–1970); blurred
genres (1970–1986); the crisis of representation
(1986–1990); the postmodern, a period of experi-
mental and new ethnographies (1990–1995);
postexperimental inquiry (1995–2000); the
methodologically contested present (2000–2004);
and the fractured future, which is now (2005– ).
The future, the eighth moment, confronts the
methodological backlash associated with the
evidence-based social movement. It is concerned
with moral discourse, with the development of
sacred textualities. The eighth moment asks that
the social sciences and the humanities become
sites for critical conversations about democracy,
race, gender, class, nation-states, globalization,
freedom, and community.5
The postmodern and postexperimental
moments were defined in part by a concern for
literary and rhetorical tropes and the narrative
turn, a concern for storytelling, for composing
ethnographies in new ways (Bochner & Ellis,
2002; Ellis, 2004; Goodall, 2000; Pelias, 2004;
Richardson & Lockridge, 2004; Trujillo, 2004).
Laurel Richardson (1997) observes that this
moment was shaped by a new sensibility, by
doubt, by a refusal to privilege any method or
theory (p. 173). But now at the dawn of this new
century we struggle to connect qualitative
research to the hopes, needs, goals, and promises
of a free democratic society.
Successive waves of epistemological theorizing
move across these eight moments. The traditional
period is associated with the positivist, founda-
tional paradigm. The modernist or golden age
and blurred genres moments are connected to the
appearance of postpositivist arguments. At the
same time, a variety of new interpretive, quali-
tative perspectives were taken up, including
hermeneutics, structuralism, semiotics, phenom-
enology, cultural studies, and feminism.6 In the
blurred genres phase, the humanities became
central resources for critical, interpretive theory,
and the qualitative research project broadly
conceived. The researcher became a bricoleur
Denzin & Lincoln: Introduction– 2–3
(see below), learning how to borrow from many
different disciplines.
The blurred genres phase produced the next
stage, the crisis of representation. Here researchers
struggled with how to locate themselves and their
subjects in reflexive texts.A kind of methodological
diaspora took place, a two-way exodus. Humanists
migrated to the social sciences, searching for new
social theory, new ways to study popular culture
and its local, ethnographic contexts. Social scien-
tists turned to the humanities, hoping to learn how
to do complex structural and poststructural read-
ings of social texts. From the humanities, social
scientists also learned how to produce texts that
refused to be read in simplistic, linear, incontro-
vertible terms. The line between text and context
blurred.In the postmodern, experimental moment,
researchers continued to move away from foun-
dational and quasi-foundational criteria (see in
this volume Smith & Hodkinson, Chapter 36;
Richardson & St. Pierre, Chapter 38). Alternative
evaluative criteria were sought, criteria that might
prove evocative, moral, critical, and rooted in local
understandings.
Any definition of qualitative research must
work within this complex historical field. Qualita-
tive research means different things in each of these
moments. Nonetheless, an initial, generic defini-
tion can be offered: Qualitative research is a situ-
ated activity that locates the observer in the world.
It consists of a set of interpretive,material practices
that make the world visible. These practices trans-
form the world. They turn the world into a series
of representations, including field notes, inter-
views, conversations, photographs, recordings, and
memos to the self.At this level, qualitative research
involves an interpretive, naturalistic approach to
the world. This means that qualitative researchers
study things in their natural settings, attempting
to make sense of, or interpret, phenomena in terms
of the meanings people bring to them.7
Qualitative research involves the studied use
and collection of a variety of empirical materials—
case study; personal experience; introspection; life
story; interview; artifacts; cultural texts and pro-
ductions; observational, historical, interactional,
and visual texts—that describe routine and prob-
lematic moments and meanings in individuals’
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lives. Accordingly, qualitative researchers deploy
a wide range of interconnected interpretive prac-
tices, hoping always to get a better understanding
of the subject matter at hand. It is understood,
however, that each practice makes the world visible
in a different way. Hence there is frequently a
commitment to using more than one interpretive
practice in any study.
The Qualitative Researcher
as Bricoleur and Quilt Maker
The qualitative researcher may be described
using multiple and gendered images: scientist,
naturalist, field-worker, journalist, social critic,
artist, performer, jazz musician, filmmaker, quilt
maker, essayist. The many methodological prac-
tices of qualitative research may be viewed as soft
science, journalism, ethnography, bricolage, quilt
making, or montage. The researcher, in turn, may
be seen as a bricoleur, as a maker of quilts, or, as
in filmmaking, a person who assembles images
into montages. (On montage, see Cook, 1981,
pp. 171–177; Monaco, 1981, pp. 322–328; and the
discussion below. On quilting, see hooks, 1990,
pp. 115–122; Wolcott, 1995, pp. 31–33.)
Harper (1987, pp. 9, 74–75, 92), de Certeau
(1984, p. xv), Nelson, Treichler, and Grossberg
(1992, p. 2), Lévi-Strauss (1966, p. 17), Weinstein
and Weinstein (1991, p. 161), and Kincheloe
(2001) clarify the meanings of bricolage and
bricoleur.8 A bricoleur makes do by “adapting the
bricoles of the world. Bricolage is ‘the poetic mak-
ing do’” (de Certeau, 1984, p. xv) with “such
bricoles—the odds and ends, the bits left over”
(Harper, 1987, p. 74). The bricoleur is a “Jack of
all trades, a kind of professional do-it-yourself”
(Lévi-Strauss,1966,p.17).In their work,bricoleurs
define and extend themselves (Harper, 1987,
p. 75). Indeed, the bricoleur’s life story, or biogra-
phy, “may be thought of as bricolage” (Harper,
1987, p. 92).
There are many kinds of bricoleurs—inter-
pretive, narrative, theoretical, political, method-
ological (see below). The interpretive bricoleur
produces a bricolage—that is, a pieced-together
set of representations that is fitted to the specifics
of a complex situation. “The solution (bricolage)
which is the result of the bricoleur’s method is an
[emergent] construction” (Weinstein & Weinstein,
1991, p. 161) that changes and takes new forms
as the bricoleur adds different tools, methods, and
techniques of representation and interpretation
to the puzzle. Nelson et al. (1992) describe the
methodology of cultural studies as “a bricolage. Its
choice of practice, that is, is pragmatic, strategic
and self-reflexive” (p. 2). This understanding can
be applied, with qualifications, to qualitative
research.
The qualitative researcher as bricoleur, or
maker of quilts, uses the aesthetic and material
tools of his or her craft, deploying whatever
strategies, methods, and empirical materials are
at hand (Becker, 1998, p. 2). If the researcher
needs to invent, or piece together, new tools
or techniques, he or she will do so.Choices regard-
ing which interpretive practices to employ are
not necessarily made in advance. As Nelson et al.
(1992) note, the “choice of research practices
depends upon the questions that are asked, and
the questions depend on their context” (p. 2),
what is available in the context, and what the
researcher can do in that setting.
These interpretive practices involve aesthetic
issues, an aesthetics of representation that goes
beyond the pragmatic or the practical. Here the
concept of montage is useful (see Cook, 1981,
p. 323; Monaco, 1981, pp. 171–172). Montage is
a method of editing cinematic images. In the
history of cinematography, montage is most
closely associated with the work of Sergei
Eisenstein, especially his film The Battleship
Potemkin (1925). In montage, several different
images are juxtaposed to or superimposed on one
another to create a picture. In a sense, montage
is like pentimento, in which something that has
been painted out of a picture (an image the
painter “repented,” or denied) becomes visible
again, creating something new. What is new is
what had been obscured by a previous image.
Montage and pentimento, like jazz, which is
improvisation, create the sense that images,
sounds, and understandings are blending together,
overlapping, forming a composite, a new creation.
The images seem to shape and define one another,
and an emotional,gestalt effect is produced.In film
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montage, images are often combined in a swiftly
run sequence that produces a dizzily revolving
collection of several images around a central or
focused picture or sequence; directors often use
such effects to signify the passage of time.
Perhaps the most famous instance of montage
in film is the Odessa Steps sequence in The
Battleship Potemkin.9 In the climax of the film, the
citizens of Odessa are being massacred by czarist
troops on the stone steps leading down to the
harbor. Eisenstein cuts to a young mother as she
pushes her baby in a carriage across the landing in
front of the firing troops. Citizens rush past her,
jolting the carriage, which she is afraid to push
down to the next flight of stairs. The troops are
above her, firing at the citizens. She is trapped
between the troops and the steps. She screams. A
line of rifles points to the sky,the rifle barrels erupt-
ing in smoke. The mother’s head sways back. The
wheels of the carriage teeter on the edge of the
steps. The mother’s hand clutches the silver buckle
of her belt. Below her, people are being beaten by
soldiers.Blood drips over the mother’s white gloves.
The baby’s hand reaches out of the carriage. The
mother sways back and forth. The troops advance.
The mother falls back against the carriage. A
woman watches in horror as the rear wheels of
the carriage roll off the edge of the landing. With
accelerating speed, the carriage bounces down the
steps, past dead citizens. The baby is jostled from
side to side inside the carriage. The soldiers fire
their rifles into a group of wounded citizens. A
student screams as the carriage leaps across the
steps, tilts, and overturns (Cook, 1981, p. 167).10
Montage uses brief images to create a clearly
defined sense of urgency and complexity. It invites
viewers to construct interpretations that build on
one another as a scene unfolds. These interpreta-
tions are based on associations among the con-
trasting images that blend into one another. The
underlying assumption of montage is that viewers
perceive and interpret the shots in a “montage
sequence not sequentially, or one at a time, but
rather simultaneously” (Cook, 1981, p. 172). The
viewer puts the sequences together into a mean-
ingful emotional whole, as if at a glance, all at once.
The qualitative researcher who uses montage is
like a quilt maker or a jazz improviser. The quilter
Denzin & Lincoln: Introduction– 2–5
stitches, edits, and puts slices of reality together.
This process creates and brings psychological and
emotional unity—a pattern—to an interpretive
experience. There are many examples of montage
in current qualitative research (see Diversi, 1998;
Holman Jones, 1999; Lather & Smithies, 1997;
Ronai, 1998; see also Holman Jones, Chapter 30,
this volume). Using multiple voices, different tex-
tual formats, and various typefaces, Lather and
Smithies (1997) weave a complex text about AIDS
and women who are HIV-positive. Holman Jones
(1999) creates a performance text using lyrics
from the blues songs sung by Billie Holiday.
In texts based on the metaphors of montage,
quilt making, and jazz improvisation, many dif-
ferent things are going on at the same time—
different voices, different perspectives, points
of views, angles of vision. Like autoethnographic
performance texts, works that use montage
simultaneously create and enact moral meaning.
They move from the personal to the political,
from the local to the historical and the cultural.
These are dialogical texts. They presume an
active audience. They create spaces for give-and-
take between reader and writer. They do more
than turn the Other into the object of the social
science gaze (see in this volume Alexander,
Chapter 16; Holman Jones, Chapter 30).
Qualitative research is inherently multi-
method in focus (Flick, 2002, pp. 226–227).
However, the use of multiple methods, or
triangulation, reflects an attempt to secure an
in-depth understanding of the phenomenon in
question. Objective reality can never be captured.
We know a thing only through its representa-
tions. Triangulation is not a tool or a strategy of
validation, but an alternative to validation (Flick,
2002, p. 227). The combination of multiple
methodological practices, empirical materials,
perspectives, and observers in a single study is
best understood, then, as a strategy that adds
rigor, breadth, complexity, richness, and depth to
any inquiry (see Flick, 2002, p. 229).
In Chapter 38 of this volume, Richardson
and St. Pierre dispute the usefulness of the
concept of triangulation, asserting that the cen-
tral image for qualitative inquiry should be the
crystal, not the triangle. Mixed-genre texts in the
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postexperimental moment have more than three
sides. Like crystals, Eisenstein’s montage, the jazz
solo, or the pieces in a quilt, the mixed-genre text
“combines symmetry and substance with an
infinite variety of shapes, substances, transmu-
tations. . . . Crystals grow, change, alter. . . .
Crystals are prisms that reflect externalities and
refract within themselves, creating different
colors, patterns, arrays, casting off in different
directions” (Richardson, 2000, p. 934).
In the crystallization process, the writer tells
the same tale from different points of view. For
example, in A Thrice-Told Tale (1992), Margery
Wolf uses fiction, field notes, and a scientific arti-
cle to give three different accounts of the same
set of experiences in a native village. Similarly, in
her play Fires in the Mirror (1993), Anna Deavere
Smith presents a series of performance pieces
based on interviews with people who were
involved in a racial conflict in Crown Heights,
Brooklyn, on August 19, 1991. The play has multi-
ple speaking parts, including conversations with
gang members, police officers, and anonymous
young girls and boys. There is no one “correct”
telling of this event. Each telling, like light hitting
a crystal, reflects a different perspective on this
incident.
Viewed as a crystalline form, as a montage,
or as a creative performance around a central
theme, triangulation as a form of, or alternative
to, validity thus can be extended. Triangulation is
the simultaneous display of multiple, refracted
realities. Each of the metaphors “works” to create
simultaneity rather than the sequential or linear.
Readers and audiences are then invited to explore
competing visions of the context, to become
immersed in and merge with new realities to
comprehend.
The methodological bricoleur is adept at per-
forming a large number of diverse tasks, ranging
from interviewing to intensive self-reflection and
introspection. The theoretical bricoleur reads
widely and is knowledgeable about the many
interpretive paradigms (feminism, Marxism,
cultural studies, constructivism, queer theory)
that can be brought to any particular problem. He
or she may not, however, feel that paradigms can
be mingled or synthesized. That is, one cannot
easily move between paradigms as overarching
philosophical systems denoting particular ontolo-
gies, epistemologies, and methodologies. They
represent belief systems that attach users to par-
ticular worldviews. Perspectives, in contrast, are
less well developed systems, and one can move
between them more easily. The researcher as
bricoleur-theorist works between and within
competing and overlapping perspectives and
paradigms.
The interpretive bricoleur understands that
research is an interactive process shaped by his
or her own personal history, biography, gender,
social class, race, and ethnicity, and by those of the
people in the setting. The critical bricoleur stresses
the dialectical and hermeneutic nature of inter-
disciplinary inquiry, knowing that the boundaries
that previously separated traditional disciplines no
longer hold (Kincheloe, 2001, p. 683). The political
bricoleur knows that science is power, for all
research findings have political implications. There
is no value-free science. This researcher seeks a
civic social science based on a politics of hope
(Lincoln, 1999). The gendered, narrative bricoleur
also knows that researchers all tell stories about the
worlds they have studied. Thus the narratives, or
stories, scientists tell are accounts couched and
framed within specific storytelling traditions,often
defined as paradigms (e.g., positivism, postposi-
tivism, constructivism).
The product of the interpretive bricoleur’s labor
is a complex, quiltlike bricolage, a reflexive collage
or montage—a set of fluid, interconnected images
and representations. This interpretive structure is
like a quilt, a performance text, a sequence of rep-
resentations connecting the parts to the whole.
Qualitative Research as a
Site of Multiple Interpretive Practices
Qualitative research, as a set of interpretive
activities, privileges no single methodological
practice over another. As a site of discussion, or
discourse, qualitative research is difficult to define
clearly. It has no theory or paradigm that is dis-
tinctly its own. As the contributions to Part II of
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this volume reveal, multiple theoretical paradigms
claim use of qualitative research methods and
strategies, from constructivist to cultural studies,
feminism, Marxism, and ethnic models of study.
Qualitative research is used in many separate
disciplines, as we will discuss below. It does not
belong to a single discipline.
Nor does qualitative research have a distinct set
of methods or practices that are entirely its own.
Qualitative researchers use semiotics, narrative,
content, discourse, archival and phonemic analy-
sis, even statistics, tables, graphs, and numbers.
They also draw on and utilize the approaches,
methods, and techniques of ethnomethodology,
phenomenology, hermeneutics, feminism, rhi-
zomatics, deconstructionism, ethnography, inter-
viewing, psychoanalysis, cultural studies, survey
research, and participant observation, among
others.11 All of these research practices “can pro-
vide important insights and knowledge” (Nelson
et al., 1992, p. 2). No specific method or practice
can be privileged over any other.
Many of these methods, or research practices,
are used in other contexts in the human disciplines.
Each bears the traces of its own disciplinary history.
Thus there is an extensive history of the uses and
meanings of ethnography and ethnology in educa-
tion (see in this volume Ladson-Billings & Donnor,
Chapter 11; Kincheloe & McLaren, Chapter 12);
of participant observation and ethnography in
anthropology (see Foley & Valenzuela, Chapter 9;
Tedlock, Chapter 18; Brady, Chapter 39), sociology
(see Holstein & Gubrium, Chapter 19; Fontana &
Frey, Chapter 27; Harper, Chapter 29), communica-
tions (see Alexander, Chapter 16; Holman Jones,
Chapter 30), and cultural studies (see Saukko,
Chapter 13); of textual, hermeneutic, feminist, psy-
choanalytic, arts-based, semiotic, and narrative
analysis in cinema and literary studies (see Olesen,
Chapter 10; Finley, Chapter 26; Brady, Chapter 39);
and of narrative, discourse, and conversational
analysis in sociology, medicine, communications,
and education (see Miller & Crabtree, Chapter 24;
Chase, Chapter 25; Perakyla, Chapter 34).
The many histories that surround each method
or research strategy reveal how multiple uses and
meanings are brought to each practice. Textual
Denzin & Lincoln: Introduction– 2–7
analyses in literary studies, for example, often
treat texts as self-contained systems. On the other
hand, a researcher working from a cultural studies
or feminist perspective reads a text in terms of its
location within a historical moment marked by a
particular gender,race,or class ideology.A cultural
studies use of ethnography would bring a set of
understandings from feminism, postmodernism,
and poststructuralism to the project.These under-
standings would not be shared by mainstream
postpositivist sociologists.Similarly, postpositivist
and poststructural historians bring different
understandings and uses to the methods and find-
ings of historical research (see Tierney, 2000).
These tensions and contradictions are all evident
in the chapters in this volume.
These separate and multiple uses and mean-
ings of the methods of qualitative research make
it difficult for scholars to agree on any essential
definition of the field, for it is never just one
thing.12 Still, we must establish a definition for
purposes of this discussion. We borrow from, and
paraphrase, Nelson et al.’s (1992, p. 4) attempt to
define cultural studies:
Qualitative research is an interdisciplinary, trans-
disciplinary, and sometimes counterdisciplinary
field. It crosscuts the humanities and the social and
physical sciences. Qualitative research is many
things at the same time. It is multiparadigmatic in
focus. Its practitioners are sensitive to the value of
the multimethod approach. They are committed to
the naturalistic perspective and to the interpretive
understanding of human experience. At the same
time, the field is inherently political and shaped by
multiple ethical and political positions.
Qualitative research embraces two tensions at
the same time. On the one hand, it is drawn to a
broad, interpretive, postexperimental, postmodern,
feminist, and critical sensibility. On the other hand,
it is drawn to more narrowly defined positivist,
postpositivist, humanistic, and naturalistic concep-
tions of human experience and its analysis. Further,
these tensions can be combined in the same project,
bringing both postmodern and naturalistic, or both
critical and humanistic, perspectives to bear.
This rather awkward statement means that
qualitative research, as a set of practices, embraces
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within its own multiple disciplinary histories
constant tensions and contradictions over the
project itself, including its methods and the forms
its findings and interpretations take. The field
sprawls between and cuts across all of the human
disciplines, even including, in some cases, the
physical sciences. Its practitioners are variously
committed to modern, postmodern, and postex-
perimental sensibilities and the approaches to
social research that these sensibilities imply.
Resistances to Qualitative Studies
The academic and disciplinary resistances to
qualitative research illustrate the politics embed-
ded in this field of discourse. The challenges to
qualitative research are many. As Seale, Gobo,
Gubrium, and Silverman (2004) observe, we can
best understand these criticisms by “distin-
guish[ing] analytically the political (or external)
role of [qualitative] methodology from the proce-
dural (or internal) one” (p. 7). Politics situate
methodology within and outside the academy.
Procedural issues define how qualitative method-
ology is used to produce knowledge about the
world.
Often, the political and the procedural inter-
sect. Politicians and “hard” scientists sometimes
call qualitative researchers journalists or soft sci-
entists. The work of qualitative scholars is termed
unscientific, or only exploratory, or subjective. It is
called criticism rather than theory or science, or it
is interpreted politically, as a disguised version of
Marxism or secular humanism (see Huber, 1995;
see also Denzin, 1997, pp. 258–261).
These political and procedural resistances
reflect an uneasy awareness that the interpretive
traditions of qualitative research commit the
researcher to a critique of the positivist or post-
positivist project. But the positivist resistance to
qualitative research goes beyond the “ever-present
desire to maintain a distinction between hard
science and soft scholarship” (Carey, 1989, p. 99;
see also Smith & Hodkinson, Chapter 36, this
volume). The experimental (positivist) sciences
(physics, chemistry, economics, and psychology,
for example) are often seen as the crowning
achievements of Western civilization, and in their
practices it is assumed that “truth” can transcend
opinion and personal bias (Carey, 1989, p. 99;
Schwandt, 1997b, p. 309). Qualitative research is
seen as an assault on this tradition, whose adher-
ents often retreat into a “value-free objectivist
science” (Carey, 1989, p. 104) model to defend
their position. They seldom attempt to make
explicit, or to critique, the “moral and political
commitments in their own contingent work”
(Carey, 1989, p. 104; see also Guba & Lincoln,
Chapter 8, this volume).
Positivists further allege that the so-called
new experimental qualitative researchers write
fiction, not science, and that these researchers
have no way of verifying their truth statements.
Ethnographic poetry and fiction signal the death
of empirical science, and there is little to be
gained by attempting to engage in moral criti-
cism. These critics presume a stable, unchanging
reality that can be studied using the empirical
methods of objective social science (see Huber,
1995). The province of qualitative research,
accordingly, is the world of lived experience, for
this is where individual belief and action intersect
with culture. Under this model there is no preoc-
cupation with discourse and method as material
interpretive practices that constitute representa-
tion and description. Thus is the textual, narrative
turn rejected by the positivists.
The opposition to positive science by the post-
structuralists is seen, then, as an attack on reason
and truth. At the same time, the positivist science
attack on qualitative research is regarded as an
attempt to legislate one version of truth over
another.
Politics and Reemergent Scientism
The scientifically based research (SBR) move-
ment initiated in recent years by the National
Research Council (NRC) has created a hostile
political environment for qualitative research.
Connected to the federal legislation known as the
No Child Left Behind Act of 2001, SBR embodies
a reemergent scientism (Maxwell, 2004), a posi-
tivist,evidence-based epistemology.The movement
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encourages researchers to employ “rigorous,
systematic, and objective methodology to obtain
reliable and valid knowledge “ (Ryan & Hood,
2004, p. 80). The preferred methodology employs
well-defined causal models and independent and
dependent variables. Researchers examine causal
models in the context of randomized controlled
experiments,which allow for replication and gener-
alization of their results (Ryan & Hood,2004,p.81).
Under such a framework, qualitative research
becomes suspect. Qualitative research does not
require well-defined variables or causal models.
The observations and measurements of qualita-
tive scholars are not based on subjects’ random
assignment to experimental groups. Qualitative
researchers do not generate “hard evidence” using
such methods. At best, through case study, inter-
view, and ethnographic methods, researchers can
gather descriptive materials that can be tested
with experimental methods. The epistemologies
of critical race, queer, postcolonial, feminist, and
postmodern theories are rendered useless by the
SBR perspective, relegated at best to the category
of scholarship, not science (Ryan & Hood, 2004,
p. 81; St. Pierre, 2004, p. 132).
Critics of the SBR movement are united on
the following points.“Bush science” (Lather, 2004,
p. 19) and its experimental, evidence-based
methodologies represent a racialized masculinist
backlash to the proliferation of qualitative inquiry
methods over the past two decades.The movement
endorses a narrow view of science (Maxwell, 2004)
that celebrates a “neoclassical experimentalism
that is a throwback to the Campbell-Stanley era
and its dogmatic adherence to an exclusive reliance
on quantitative methods” (Howe, 2004, p. 42). The
movement represents “nostalgia for a simple and
ordered universe of science that never was”
(Popkewitz, 2004, p. 62).With its emphasis on only
one form of scientific rigor, the NRC ignores the
value of using complex historical, contextual, and
political criteria to evaluate inquiry (Bloch, 2004).
As Howe (2004) observes, neoclassical experi-
mentalists extol evidence-based “medical research
as the model for educational research, particularly
the random clinical trial” (p. 48). But dispensing
a pill in a random clinical trial is quite unlike
Denzin & Lincoln: Introduction– 2–9
“dispensing a curriculum,” and the “effects” of an
educational experiment cannot be easily mea-
sured, unlike a “10-point reduction in diastolic
blood pressure” (p. 48; see also Miller & Crabtree,
Chapter 24, this volume).
Qualitative researchers must learn to think
outside the box as they critique the NRC and its
methodological guidelines (Atkinson, 2004). They
must apply their imaginations and find new ways
to define such terms as randomized design, causal
model, policy studies, and public science (Cannella
& Lincoln, 2004a, 2004b; Lincoln & Cannella,
2004a, 2004b; Lincoln & Tierney, 2004; Weinstein,
2004). More deeply, qualitative researchers must
resist conservative attempts to discredit qualita-
tive inquiry by placing it back inside the box of
positivism.
Mixed-Methods Experimentalism
As Howe (2004) notes, the SBR movement finds
a place for qualitative methods in mixed-methods
experimental designs. In such designs, qualitative
methods may be “employed either singly or in
combination with quantitative methods, including
the use of randomized experimental designs”
(p. 49). Mixed-methods designs are direct descen-
dants of classical experimentalism. They presume
a methodological hierarchy in which quantitative
methods are at the top and qualitative methods are
relegated to “a largely auxiliary role in pursuit of
the technocratic aim of accumulating knowledge of
‘what works’” (pp. 53–54).
The mixed-methods movement takes qualita-
tive methods out of their natural home, which is
within the critical, interpretive framework (Howe,
2004, p. 54; but see Teddlie & Tashakkori, 2003,
p. 15). It divides inquiry into dichotomous cate-
gories: exploration versus confirmation. Quali-
tative work is assigned to the first category,
quantitative research to the second (Teddlie &
Tashakkori, 2003, p. 15). Like the classic experi-
mental model, it excludes stakeholders from dia-
logue and active participation in the research
process. This weakens its democratic and dialog-
ical dimensions and decreases the likelihood that
previously silenced voices will be heard (Howe,
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2004, pp. 56–57). As Howe (2004) cautions, it is
not just the “‘methodological fundamentalists’
who have bought into [this] approach. A sizable
number of rather influential . . . educational
researchers . . . have also signed on. This might
be a compromise to the current political climate;
it might be a backlash against the perceived
excesses of postmodernism; it might be both. It
is an ominous development, whatever the expla-
nation” (p. 57).
Pragmatic Criticisms of Antifoundationalism
Seale et al. (2004) contest what they regard as
the excesses of an antimethodological, “anything
goes,” romantic postmodernism that is associated
with our project. They assert that too often the
approach we value produces “low quality qualita-
tive research and research results that are quite
stereotypical and close to common sense” (p. 2).
In contrast, they propose a practice-based, prag-
matic approach that places research practice at
the center. They note that research involves an
engagement “with a variety of things and people:
research materials . . . social theories, philosoph-
ical debates, values, methods, tests . . . research
participants” (p. 2). (Actually, this approach is
quite close to our own, especially our view of the
bricoleur and bricolage.) Seale et al.’s situated
methodology rejects the antifoundational claim
that there are only partial truths, that the dividing
line between fact and fiction has broken down
(p. 3). These scholars believe that this dividing
line has not collapsed, and that qualitative
researchers should not accept stories if they do
not accord with the best available facts (p. 6).
Oddly, these pragmatic procedural arguments
reproduce a variant of the evidence-based model
and its criticisms of poststructural, performative
sensibilities. They can be used to provide political
support for the methodological marginalization
of the positions advanced by many of the contrib-
utors to this volume.
2 2 2
The complex political terrain described
above defines the many traditions and strands
of qualitative research: the British tradition and
its presence in other national contexts; the
American pragmatic, naturalistic, and inter-
pretive traditions in sociology, anthropology,
communications, and education; the German and
French phenomenological, hermeneutic, semi-
otic, Marxist, structural, and poststructural per-
spectives; feminist studies, African American
studies, Latino studies, queer studies, studies of
indigenous and aboriginal cultures. The politics
of qualitative research creates a tension that
informs each of these traditions. This tension
itself is constantly being reexamined and interro-
gated as qualitative research confronts a changing
historical world, new intellectual positions, and
its own institutional and academic conditions.
To summarize: Qualitative research is many
things to many people. Its essence is twofold: a
commitment to some version of the naturalistic,
interpretive approach to its subject matter and an
ongoing critique of the politics and methods of
postpositivism. We turn now to a brief discussion
of the major differences between qualitative and
quantitative approaches to research. We then
discuss ongoing differences and tensions within
qualitative inquiry.
2 QUALITATIVE VERSUS
QUANTITATIVE RESEARCH
The word qualitative implies an emphasis on the
qualities of entities and on processes and mean-
ings that are not experimentally examined or
measured (if measured at all) in terms of quan-
tity, amount, intensity, or frequency. Qualitative
researchers stress the socially constructed nature
of reality, the intimate relationship between the
researcher and what is studied, and the situational
constraints that shape inquiry. Such researchers
emphasize the value-laden nature of inquiry. They
seek answers to questions that stress how social
experience is created and given meaning. In con-
trast, quantitative studies emphasize the measure-
ment and analysis of causal relationships between
variables, not processes. Proponents of such stud-
ies claim that their work is done from within a
value-free framework.
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Research Styles:
Doing the Same Things Differently?
Of course, both qualitative and quantitative
researchers “think they know something about
society worth telling to others, and they use a
variety of forms, media and means to communi-
cate their ideas and findings” (Becker, 1986,
p. 122). Qualitative research differs from quanti-
tative research in five significant ways (Becker,
1996). These points of difference, discussed in
turn below, all involve different ways of address-
ing the same set of issues. They return always to
the politics of research and to who has the power
to legislate correct solutions to social problems.
Uses of positivism and postpositivism. First,
both perspectives are shaped by the positivist and
postpositivist traditions in the physical and social
sciences (see the discussion below). These two pos-
itivist science traditions hold to naive and critical
realist positions concerning reality and its percep-
tion. In the positivist version it is contended that
there is a reality out there to be studied, captured,
and understood, whereas the postpositivists argue
that reality can never be fully apprehended, only
approximated (Guba, 1990, p. 22). Postpositivism
relies on multiple methods as a way of capturing
as much of reality as possible. At the same time,
it emphasizes the discovery and verification of
theories. Traditional evaluation criteria, such as
internal and external validity, are stressed, as is the
use of qualitative procedures that lend themselves
to structured (sometimes statistical) analysis.
Computer-assisted methods of analysis that permit
frequency counts, tabulations, and low-level statis-
tical analyses may also be employed.
The positivist and postpositivist traditions
linger like long shadows over the qualitative
research project. Historically, qualitative research
was defined within the positivist paradigm, where
qualitative researchers attempted to do good
positivist research with less rigorous methods
and procedures. Some mid-20th-century qualita-
tive researchers reported participant observation
findings in terms of quasi-statistics (e.g., Becker,
Geer, Hughes, & Strauss, 1961). As recently as
1998, Strauss and Corbin, two leading proponents
Denzin & Lincoln: Introduction– 2–11
of the grounded theory approach to qualitative
research, attempted to modify the usual canons of
good (positivist) science to fit their own postpos-
itivist conception of rigorous research (but see
Charmaz, Chapter 20, this volume; see also Glaser,
1992). Some applied researchers, while claiming
to be atheoretical, often fit within the positivist or
postpositivist framework by default.
Flick (2002) usefully summarizes the dif-
ferences between these two approaches to
inquiry, noting that the quantitative approach
has been used for purposes of isolating “causes
and effects . . . operationalizing theoretical rela-
tions . . . [and] measuring and . . . quantifying
phenomena . . . allowing the generalization of
findings” (p. 3). But today doubt is cast on such
projects: “Rapid social change and the resulting
diversification of life worlds are increasingly con-
fronting social researchers with new social con-
texts and perspectives. . . . traditional deductive
methodologies . . . are failing. . . . thus research
is increasingly forced to make use of inductive
strategies instead of starting from theories and
testing them. . . . knowledge and practice are
studied as local knowledge and practice” (p. 2).
Spindler and Spindler (1992) summarize their
qualitative approach to quantitative materials:
“Instrumentation and quantification are simply
procedures employed to extend and reinforce cer-
tain kinds of data, interpretations and test hypo-
theses across samples. Both must be kept in their
place. One must avoid their premature or overly
extensive use as a security mechanism” (p. 69).
Although many qualitative researchers in the
postpositivist tradition use statistical measures,
methods, and documents as a way of locating a
group of subjects within a larger population, they
seldom report their findings in terms of the kinds
of complex statistical measures or methods to
which quantitative researchers are drawn (e.g.,
path, regression, and log-linear analyses).
Acceptance of postmodern sensibilities. The use
of quantitative, positivist methods and assump-
tions has been rejected by a new generation of
qualitative researchers who are attached to post-
structural and/or postmodern sensibilities. These
researchers argue that positivist methods are but
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one way of telling stories about societies or social
worlds. These methods may be no better or no
worse than any other methods; they just tell
different kinds of stories.
This tolerant view is not shared by all qualita-
tive researchers (Huber, 1995). Many members of
the critical theory, constructivist, poststructural,
and postmodern schools of thought reject posi-
tivist and postpositivist criteria when evaluating
their own work. They see these criteria as irrele-
vant to their work and contend that such criteria
reproduce only a certain kind of science, a science
that silences too many voices. These researchers
seek alternative methods for evaluating their
work, including verisimilitude, emotionality, per-
sonal responsibility, an ethic of caring, political
praxis, multivoiced texts, and dialogues with
subjects. In response, positivists and postposi-
tivists argue that what they do is good science,
free of individual bias and subjectivity. As noted
above, they see postmodernism and poststruc-
turalism as attacks on reason and truth.
Capturing the individual’s point of view. Both
qualitative and quantitative researchers are
concerned with the individual’s point of view.
However, qualitative investigators think they can
get closer to the actor’s perspective through
detailed interviewing and observation. They
argue that quantitative researchers are seldom
able to capture their subjects’ perspectives
because they have to rely on more remote, infer-
ential empirical methods and materials. Many
quantitative researchers regard the empirical
materials produced by interpretive methods as
unreliable, impressionistic, and not objective.
Examining the constraints of everyday life.
Qualitative researchers are more likely to
confront and come up against the constraints of
the everyday social world. They see this world in
action and embed their findings in it. Quantita-
tive researchers abstract from this world and
seldom study it directly. They seek a nomothetic
or etic science based on probabilities derived
from the study of large numbers of randomly
selected cases. These kinds of statements stand
above and outside the constraints of everyday
life. Qualitative researchers, on the other hand,
are committed to an emic, idiographic, case-
based position that directs their attention to the
specifics of particular cases.
Securing rich descriptions. Qualitative researchers
believe that rich descriptions of the social world
are valuable, whereas quantitative researchers,
with their etic, nomothetic commitments, are
less concerned with such detail. Quantitative
researchers are deliberately unconcerned with
rich descriptions because such detail interrupts
the process of developing generalizations.
2 2 2
The five points of difference described above
reflect qualitative and quantitative scholars’ com-
mitments to different styles of research, different
epistemologies, and different forms of representa-
tion.Each work tradition is governed by a different
set of genres; each has its own classics, its own
preferred forms of representation, interpreta-
tion, trustworthiness, and textual evaluation (see
Becker, 1986, pp. 134–135). Qualitative researchers
use ethnographic prose, historical narratives, first-
person accounts, still photographs, life histories,
fictionalized “facts,” and biographical and autobio-
graphical materials, among others. Quantitative
researchers use mathematical models, statistical
tables, and graphs, and they usually write about
their research in impersonal, third-person prose.
2 TENSIONS WITHIN
QUALITATIVE RESEARCH
It is erroneous to presume that all qualitative
researchers share the same assumptions about
the five points of difference described above. As
the following discussion reveals, positivist, post-
positivist, and poststructural differences define
and shape the discourses of qualitative research.
Realists and postpositivists within the inter-
pretive, qualitative research tradition criticize
poststructuralists for taking the textual, narrative
turn. These critics contend that such work is navel
gazing. It produces the conditions “for a dialogue
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of the deaf between itself and the community”
(Silverman, 1997, p. 240). Critics accuse those who
attempt to capture the point of view of the inter-
acting subject in the world of naive humanism, of
reproducing “a Romantic impulse which elevates
the experiential to the level of the authentic”
(Silverman, 1997, p. 248).
Still others assert that those who take the
textual, performance turn ignore lived experi-
ence. Snow and Morrill (1995) argue that “this
performance turn, like the preoccupation with
discourse and storytelling, will take us further
from the field of social action and the real dramas
of everyday life and thus signal the death knell of
ethnography as an empirically grounded enter-
prise” (p. 361). Of course, we disagree.
Critical Realism
For some, there is a third stream, between naive
positivism and poststructuralism. Critical realism
is an antipositivist movement in the social sciences
closely associated with the works of Roy Bhaskar
and Rom Harré (Danermark, Ekström, Jakobsen, &
Karlsson, 2002). Critical realists use the word criti-
cal in a particular way. This is not “Frankfurt
school” critical theory, although there are traces of
social criticism here and there (see Danermark
et al., 2002, p. 201). Instead, critical in this context
refers to a transcendental realism that rejects
methodological individualism and universal claims
to truth. Critical realists oppose logical positivist,
relativist, and antifoundational epistemologies.
Critical realists agree with the positivists that there
is a world of events out there that is observable and
independent of human consciousness. They hold
that knowledge about this world is socially con-
structed. Society is made up of feeling, thinking
human beings, and their interpretations of the
world must be studied (Danermark et al., 2002,
p. 200). Critical realists reject a correspondence
theory of truth.They believe that reality is arranged
in levels and that scientific work must go beyond
statements of regularity to analysis of the mecha-
nisms, processes, and structures that account for
the patterns that are observed.
Still, as postempiricist, antifoundational, criti-
cal theorists, we reject much of what the critical
Denzin & Lincoln: Introduction– 2–13
realists advocate. Throughout the past century,
social science and philosophy have been continu-
ally tangled up with one another. Various “isms”
and philosophical movements have crisscrossed
sociological and educational discourse, from posi-
tivism to postpositivism, to analytic and linguistic
philosophy, to hermeneutics, structuralism, post-
structuralism, Marxism, feminism, and current
post-post versions of all of the above. Some have
said that the logical positivists steered the social
sciences on a rigorous course of self-destruction.
We do not think that critical realism will keep
the social science ship afloat. The social sciences
are normative disciplines, always already embed-
ded in issues of value, ideology, power, desire, sex-
ism, racism, domination, repression, and control.
We want a social science that is committed up front
to issues of social justice, equity, nonviolence,
peace, and universal human rights.We do not want
a social science that says it can address these issues
if it wants to. For us, that is no longer an option.
With these differences within and between
interpretive traditions in hand, we must now
briefly discuss the history of qualitative research.
We break this history into eight historical
moments, mindful that any history is always
somewhat arbitrary and always at least partially
a social construction.
2 THE HISTORY OF
QUALITATIVE RESEARCH
The history of qualitative research reveals that the
modern social science disciplines have taken as
their mission “the analysis and understanding of
the patterned conduct and social processes of
society”(Vidich & Lyman, 2000, p.37).The notion
that social scientists could carry out this task
presupposed that they had the ability to observe
this world objectively. Qualitative methods were a
major tool of such observations.13
Throughout the history of qualitative research,
qualitative investigators have defined their work
in terms of hopes and values, “religious faiths,
occupational and professional ideologies” (Vidich
& Lyman, 2000, p. 39). Qualitative research (like
all research) has always been judged on the
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“standard of whether the work communicates or
‘says’ something to us” (Vidich & Lyman, 2000,
p. 39), based on how we conceptualize our reality
and our images of the world. Epistemology is the
word that has historically defined these standards
of evaluation. In the contemporary period, as we
have argued above, many received discourses on
epistemology are now being reevaluated.
Vidich and Lyman’s (2000) work on the
history of qualitative research covers the follow-
ing (somewhat) overlapping stages: early ethnog-
raphy (to the 17th century), colonial ethnography
(17th-, 18th-, and 19th-century explorers), the
ethnography of the American Indian as “Other”
(late-19th- and early-20th-century anthropol-
ogy), community studies and ethnographies
of American immigrants (early 20th century
through the 1960s), studies of ethnicity and
assimilation (midcentury through the 1980s), and
the present, which we call the eighth moment.
In each of these eras, researchers were and
have been influenced by their political hopes and
ideologies, discovering findings in their research
that confirmed their prior theories or beliefs.
Early ethnographers confirmed the racial and
cultural diversity of peoples throughout the
globe and attempted to fit this diversity into a
theory about the origins of history, the races,
and civilizations. Colonial ethnographers, before
the professionalization of ethnography in the
20th century, fostered a colonial pluralism that
left natives on their own as long as their leaders
could be co-opted by the colonial administration.
European ethnographers studied Africans,
Asians, and other Third World peoples of color.
Early American ethnographers studied the
American Indian from the perspective of the con-
queror, who saw the lifeworld of the primitive as
a window to the prehistoric past. The Calvinist
mission to save the Indian was soon transferred to
the mission of saving the “hordes” of immigrants
who entered the United States with the begin-
nings of industrialization. Qualitative community
studies of the ethnic Other proliferated from the
early 1900s to the 1960s and included the work of
E. Franklin Frazier, Robert Park, and Robert
Redfield and their students, as well as William
Foote Whyte, the Lynds, August Hollingshead,
Herbert Gans, Stanford Lyman, Arthur Vidich, and
Joseph Bensman. The post-1960 ethnicity studies
challenged the “melting pot” hypotheses of Park
and his followers and corresponded to the emer-
gence of ethnic studies programs that saw Native
Americans, Latinos, Asian Americans, and African
Americans attempting to take control over the
study of their own peoples.
The postmodern and poststructural challenge
emerged in the mid-1980s. It questioned the
assumptions that had organized this earlier
history in each of its colonizing moments. Quali-
tative research that crosses the “postmodern
divide” requires the scholar, Vidich and Lyman
(2000) argue, to “abandon all established and pre-
conceived values, theories, perspectives . . . and
prejudices as resources for ethnographic study”
(p. 60). In this new era the qualitative researcher
does more than observe history; he or she plays a
part in it.New tales from the field will now be writ-
ten, and they will reflect the researchers’ direct and
personal engagement with this historical period.
Vidich and Lyman’s analysis covers the full
sweep of ethnographic history. Ours is confined
to the 20th and 21st centuries and complements
many of their divisions. We begin with the early
foundational work of the British and French as
well as the Chicago, Columbia, Harvard, Berkeley,
and British schools of sociology and anthropology.
This early foundational period established the
norms of classical qualitative and ethnographic
research (see Gupta & Ferguson, 1997; Rosaldo,
1989; Stocking, 1989).
2 THE EIGHT MOMENTS
OF QUALITATIVE RESEARCH
As we have noted above, we divide our history of
qualitative research in North America in the 20th
century and beyond into eight phases, which we
describe in turn below.
The Traditional Period
We call the first moment the traditional period
(this covers the second and third phases discussed
by Vidich & Lyman, 2000). It begins in the early
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1900s and continues until World War II. In this
period, qualitative researchers wrote “objective, “
colonizing accounts of field experiences that were
reflective of the positivist scientist paradigm. They
were concerned with offering valid, reliable, and
objective interpretations in their writings. The
“Other” whom they studied was alien, foreign, and
strange.
Here is Malinowski (1967) discussing his field
experiences in New Guinea and the Trobriand
Islands in the years 1914–15 and 1917–18. He is
bartering his way into field data:
Nothing whatever draws me to ethnographic
studies. . . . On the whole the village struck me
rather unfavorably. There is a certain disorganiza-
tion . . . the rowdiness and persistence of the people
who laugh and stare and lie discouraged me some-
what. . . .Went to the village hoping to photograph a
few stages of the bara dance.I handed out half-sticks
of tobacco, then watched a few dances; then took
pictures—but results were poor. . . . they would not
pose long enough for time exposures. At moments
I was furious at them, particularly because after
I gave them their portions of tobacco they all went
away. (quoted in Geertz, 1988, pp. 73–74)
In another work, this lonely, frustrated, isolated
field-worker describes his methods in the follow-
ing words:
In the field one has to face a chaos of facts. . . . in
this crude form they are not scientific facts at all;
they are absolutely elusive, and can only be fixed by
interpretation. . . . Only laws and generalizations
are scientific facts, and field work consists only and
exclusively in the interpretation of the chaotic
social reality, in subordinating it to general rules.
(Malinowski, 1916/1948, p. 328; quoted in Geertz,
1988, p. 81)
Malinowski’s remarks are provocative. On the one
hand they disparage fieldwork, but on the other
they speak of it within the glorified language of
science, with laws and generalizations fashioned
out of this selfsame experience.
During this period the field-worker was lion-
ized, made into a larger-than-life figure who went
into the field and returned with stories about
strange peoples. Rosaldo (1989) describes this as
Denzin & Lincoln: Introduction– 2–15
the period of the Lone Ethnographer, the story of
the man-scientist who went off in search of his
native in a distant land. There this figure “encoun-
tered the object of his quest . . . [and] underwent
his rite of passage by enduring the ultimate ordeal
of ‘fieldwork’” (p. 30). Returning home with his
data, the Lone Ethnographer wrote up an objective
account of the culture studied. This account was
structured by the norms of classical ethnography.
This sacred bundle of terms (Rosaldo, 1989, p. 31)
organized ethnographic texts around four beliefs
and commitments: a commitment to objectivism,
a complicity with imperialism, a belief in monu-
mentalism (the ethnography would create a muse-
umlike picture of the culture studied), and a belief
in timelessness (what was studied would never
change). The Other was an “object” to be archived.
This model of the researcher, who could also write
complex, dense theories about what was studied,
holds to the present day.
The myth of the Lone Ethnographer depicts
the birth of classic ethnography. The texts of
Malinowski, Radcliffe-Brown, Margaret Mead, and
Gregory Bateson are still carefully studied for what
they can tell the novice about fieldwork, taking
field notes, and writing theory. But today the
image of the Lone Ethnographer has been shat-
tered. Many scholars see the works of the classic
ethnographers as relics from the colonial past
(Rosaldo, 1989, p.44).Whereas some feel nostalgia
for this past, others celebrate its passing. Rosaldo
(1989) quotes Cora Du Bois, a retired Harvard
anthropology professor, who lamented this pass-
ing at a conference in 1980, reflecting on the crisis
in anthropology:“[I feel a distance] from the com-
plexity and disarray of what I once found a justifi-
able and challenging discipline. . . . It has been
like moving from a distinguished art museum into
a garage sale” (p. 44).
Du Bois regards the classic ethnographies
as pieces of timeless artwork contained in a
museum. She feels uncomfortable in the chaos
of the garage sale. In contrast, Rosaldo (1989) is
drawn to this metaphor because “it provides a pre-
cise image of the postcolonial situation where cul-
tural artifacts flow between unlikely places, and
nothing is sacred, permanent, or sealed off. The
image of anthropology as a garage sale depicts our
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16– 2– HANDBOOK OF QUALITATIVE RESEARCH—CHAPTER 1
present global situation” (p. 44). Indeed, many
valuable treasures may be found in unexpected
places, if one is willing to look long and hard. Old
standards no longer hold. Ethnographies do not
produce timeless truths. The commitment to
objectivism is now in doubt. The complicity with
imperialism is openly challenged today, and the
belief in monumentalism is a thing of the past.
The legacies of this first period begin at the
end of the 19th century, when the novel and the
social sciences had become distinguished as
separate systems of discourse (Clough, 1998,
pp. 21–22). However, the Chicago school, with its
emphasis on the life story and the “slice-of-life”
approach to ethnographic materials, sought to
develop an interpretive methodology that main-
tained the centrality of the narrated life history
approach. This led to the production of texts that
gave the researcher-as-author the power to repre-
sent the subject’s story. Written under the mantle
of straightforward, sentiment-free social realism,
these texts used the language of ordinary people.
They articulated a social science version of liter-
ary naturalism, which often produced the sympa-
thetic illusion that a solution to a social problem
had been found. Like the Depression-era juvenile
delinquent and other “social problems” films
(Roffman & Purdy, 1981), these accounts roman-
ticized the subject. They turned the deviant into a
sociological version of a screen hero. These socio-
logical stories, like their film counterparts, usually
had happy endings, as they followed individuals
through the three stages of the classic morality
tale: being in a state of grace, being seduced by
evil and falling, and finally achieving redemption
through suffering.
Modernist Phase
The modernist phase, or second moment,
builds on the canonical works from the traditional
period. Social realism, naturalism, and slice-of-life
ethnographies are still valued.This phase extended
through the postwar years to the 1970s and is still
present in the work of many (for reviews, see
Wolcott,1990,1992,1995; see also Tedlock,Chapter
18, this volume). In this period many texts sought
to formalize qualitative methods (see, e.g., Bogdan
& Taylor, 1975; Cicourel, 1964; Filstead, 1970;
Glaser & Strauss, 1967; Lofland, 1971, 1995;
Lofland & Lofland, 1984, 1995; Taylor & Bogdan,
1998).14 The modernist ethnographer and socio-
logical participant observer attempted rigorous
qualitative studies of important social processes,
including deviance and social control in the class-
room and society. This was a moment of creative
ferment.
A new generation of graduate students across
the human disciplines encountered new interpre-
tive theories (ethnomethodology, phenomenol-
ogy, critical theory, feminism). They were drawn
to qualitative research practices that would let
them give a voice to society’s underclass. Post-
positivism functioned as a powerful epistemo-
logical paradigm. Researchers attempted to fit
Campbell and Stanley’s (1963) model of internal
and external validity to constructionist and inter-
actionist conceptions of the research act. They
returned to the texts of the Chicago school as
sources of inspiration (see Denzin, 1970, 1978).
A canonical text from this moment remains
Boys in White (Becker et al., 1961; see also Becker,
1998). Firmly entrenched in mid-20th-century
methodological discourse, this work attempted to
make qualitative research as rigorous as its quan-
titative counterpart. Causal narratives were central
to this project. This multimethod work combined
open-ended and quasi-structured interviewing
with participant observation and the careful
analysis of such materials in standardized, statis-
tical form. In his classic article “Problems of
Inference and Proof in Participant Observation,”
Howard S. Becker (1958/1970) describes the use of
quasi-statistics:
Participant observations have occasionally been
gathered in standardized form capable of being
transformed into legitimate statistical data. But the
exigencies of the field usually prevent the collection
of data in such a form to meet the assumptions of
statistical tests, so that the observer deals in what
have been called “quasi-statistics.” His conclusions,
while implicitly numerical, do not require precise
quantification. (p. 31)
In the analysis of data, Becker notes, the qualita-
tive researcher takes a cue from more quantitatively
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oriented colleagues. The researcher looks for proba-
bilities or support for arguments concerning the
likelihood that, or frequency with which, a conclu-
sion in fact applies in a specific situation (see also
Becker, 1998, pp. 166–170). Thus did work in the
modernist period clothe itself in the language and
rhetoric of positivist and postpositivist discourse.
This was the golden age of rigorous qualitative
analysis, bracketed in sociology by Boys in White
(Becker et al., 1961) at one end and The Discovery
of Grounded Theory (Glaser & Strauss, 1967) at
the other. In education, qualitative research in
this period was defined by George and Louise
Spindler, Jules Henry, Harry Wolcott, and John
Singleton. This form of qualitative research is still
present in the work of scholars such as Strauss
and Corbin (1998) and Ryan and Bernard (2000).
The “golden age” reinforced the picture of qual-
itative researchers as cultural romantics. Imbued
with Promethean human powers, they valorized
villains and outsiders as heroes to mainstream
society. They embodied a belief in the contingency
of self and society, and held to emancipatory ideals
for “which one lives and dies.” They put in place a
tragic and often ironic view of society and self, and
joined a long line of leftist cultural romantics that
included Emerson, Marx, James, Dewey, Gramsci,
and Martin Luther King, Jr. (West, 1989, chap. 6).
As this moment came to an end, the Vietnam
War was everywhere present in American society.
In 1969, alongside these political currents, Herbert
Blumer and Everett Hughes met with a group of
young sociologists called the “Chicago Irregulars”
at the American Sociological Association meetings
held in San Francisco and shared their memo-
ries of the “Chicago years.” Lyn Lofland (1980)
describes this time as a
moment of creative ferment—scholarly and politi-
cal. The San Francisco meetings witnessed not
simply the Blumer-Hughes event but a “counter-
revolution.” . . . a group first came to . . . talk about
the problems of being a sociologist and a
female. . . . the discipline seemed literally to be
bursting with new . . . ideas: labelling theory, eth-
nomethodology, conflict theory, phenomenology,
dramaturgical analysis. (p. 253)
Thus did the modernist phase come to an end.
Denzin & Lincoln: Introduction– 2–17
Blurred Genres
By the beginning of the third phase (1970–
1986), which we call the moment of blurred genres,
qualitative researchers had a full complement of
paradigms, methods, and strategies to employ
in their research. Theories ranged from sym-
bolic interactionism to constructivism,naturalistic
inquiry, positivism and postpositivism, phenom-
enology, ethnomethodology, critical theory, neo-
Marxist theory,semiotics,structuralism,feminism,
and various racial/ethnic paradigms.Applied qual-
itative research was gaining in stature, and the pol-
itics and ethics of qualitative research—implicated
as they were in various applications of this work—
were topics of considerable concern. Research
strategies and formats for reporting research
ranged from grounded theory to the case study, to
methods of historical, biographical, ethnographic,
action, and clinical research. Diverse ways of col-
lecting and analyzing empirical materials were also
available, including qualitative interviewing (open-
ended and quasi-structured) and observational,
visual, personal experience, and documentary
methods. Computers were entering the situation,
to be fully developed as aids in the analysis of qual-
itative data in the next decade,along with narrative,
content, and semiotic methods of reading inter-
views and cultural texts.
Two books by Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation
of Cultures (1973) and Local Knowledge (1983),
defined the beginning and the end of this moment.
In these two works,Geertz argued that the old func-
tional, positivist, behavioral, totalizing approaches
to the human disciplines were giving way to a more
pluralistic, interpretive, open-ended perspective.
This new perspective took cultural representations
and their meanings as its points of departure.
Calling for “thick description” of particular events,
rituals, and customs, Geertz suggested that all
anthropological writings are interpretations of
interpretations.15 The observer has no privileged
voice in the interpretations that are written. The
central task of theory is to make sense out of a local
situation.
Geertz went on to propose that the boundaries
between the social sciences and the humanities
had become blurred. Social scientists were now
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18– 2– HANDBOOK OF QUALITATIVE RESEARCH—CHAPTER 1
turning to the humanities for models, theories,
and methods of analysis (semiotics, hermeneu-
tics).A form of genre diaspora was occurring: doc-
umentaries that read like fiction (Mailer), parables
posing as ethnographies (Castañeda), theoretical
treatises that look like travelogues (Lévi-Strauss).
At the same time, other new approaches were
emerging: poststructuralism (Barthes), neoposi-
tivism (Philips), neo-Marxism (Althusser), micro-
macro descriptivism (Geertz), ritual theories of
drama and culture (V. Turner), deconstructionism
(Derrida), ethnomethodology (Garfinkel). The
golden age of the social sciences was over, and a
new age of blurred, interpretive genres was upon
us. The essay as an art form was replacing the
scientific article. At issue now was the author’s
presence in the interpretive text (Geertz, 1988).
How can the researcher speak with authority in an
age when there are no longer any firm rules con-
cerning the text, including the author’s place in it,
its standards of evaluation, and its subject matter?
The naturalistic, postpositivist, and construc-
tionist paradigms gained power in this period,
especially in education, in the works of Harry
Wolcott, Frederick Erickson, Egon Guba, Yvonna
Lincoln, Robert Stake, and Elliot Eisner. By the
end of the 1970s, several qualitative journals were
in place, including Urban Life and Culture (now
Journal of Contemporary Ethnography), Cultural
Anthropology, Anthropology and Education
Quarterly, Qualitative Sociology, and Symbolic
Interaction, as well as the book series Studies in
Symbolic Interaction.
Crisis of Representation
A profound rupture occurred in the mid-
1980s.What we call the fourth moment, or the cri-
sis of representation, appeared with Anthropology
as Cultural Critique (Marcus & Fischer, 1986), The
Anthropology of Experience (Turner & Bruner,
1986), Writing Culture (Clifford & Marcus, 1986),
Works and Lives (Geertz, 1988), and The Predica-
ment of Culture (Clifford, 1988). These works
made research and writing more reflexive and
called into question the issues of gender, class,
and race. They articulated the consequences of
Geertz’s “blurred genres” interpretation of the
field in the early 1980s.16
Qualitative researchers sought new models
of truth, method, and representation (Rosaldo,
1989). The erosion of classic norms in anthropol-
ogy (objectivism, complicity with colonialism,
social life structured by fixed rituals and customs,
ethnographies as monuments to a culture) was
complete (Rosaldo, 1989, pp. 44–45; see also
Jackson, 1998, pp. 7–8). Critical theory, feminist
theory, and epistemologies of color now competed
for attention in this arena. Issues such as validity,
reliability, and objectivity, previously believed set-
tled, were once more problematic. Pattern and
interpretive theories, as opposed to causal, linear
theories, were now more common, as writers con-
tinued to challenge older models of truth and
meaning (Rosaldo, 1989).
Stoller and Olkes (1987, pp. 227–229) describe
how they felt the crisis of representation in their
fieldwork among the Songhay of Niger. Stoller
observes: “When I began to write anthropological
texts, I followed the conventions of my training.
I ‘gathered data,’ and once the ‘data’ were
arranged in neat piles, I ‘wrote them up.’ In one
case I reduced Songhay insults to a series of neat
logical formulas”(p. 227). Stoller became dissatis-
fied with this form of writing, in part because he
learned “everyone had lied to me and . . . the data
I has so painstakingly collected were worthless. I
learned a lesson: Informants routinely lie to their
anthropologists” (Stoller & Olkes, 1987, p. 9). This
discovery led to a second—that he had, in follow-
ing the conventions of ethnographic realism,
edited himself out of his text. This led Stoller to
produce a different type of text, a memoir, in
which he became a central character in the story
he told. This story, an account of his experiences
in the Songhay world, became an analysis of the
clash between his world and the world of Songhay
sorcery. Thus Stoller’s journey represents an
attempt to confront the crisis of representation in
the fourth moment.
Clough (1998) elaborates this crisis and
criticizes those who would argue that new forms
of writing represent a way out of the crisis. She
argues:
01-Denzin.qxd 2/7/2005 9:20 PM Page 19
While many sociologists now commenting on
the criticism of ethnography view writing as
“downright central to the ethnographic enterprise”
[Van Maanen, 1988, p. xi], the problems of writ-
ing are still viewed as different from the problems
of method or fieldwork itself. Thus the solution
usually offered is experiments in writing, that is a
self-consciousness about writing. (p. 136)
It is this insistence on the difference between
writing and fieldwork that must be analyzed.
(Richardson & St. Pierre are quite articulate about
this issue in Chapter 38 of this volume).
In writing, the field-worker makes a claim to
moral and scientific authority. This claim allows
the realist and experimental ethnographic texts to
function as sources of validation for an empirical
science. They show that the world of real lived
experience can still be captured, if only in the
writer’s memoirs, or fictional experimentations,
or dramatic readings. But these works have the
danger of directing attention away from the ways
in which the text constructs sexually situated
individuals in a field of social difference. They
also perpetuate “empirical science’s hegemony”
(Clough, 1998, p. 8), for these new writing tech-
nologies of the subject become the site “for the
production of knowledge/power . . . [aligned]
with . . . the capital/state axis” (Aronowitz, 1988,
p. 300; quoted in Clough, 1998, p. 8). Such experi-
ments come up against, and then back away from,
the difference between empirical science and
social criticism. Too often they fail to engage fully
a new politics of textuality that would “refuse the
identity of empirical science” (Clough, 1998,
p. 135). This new social criticism “would inter-
vene in the relationship of information econom-
ics, nation-state politics, and technologies of mass
communication, especially in terms of the empir-
ical sciences” (Clough, 1998, p. 16). This, of
course, is the terrain occupied by cultural studies.
In Chapter 38 of this volume, Richardson and
St. Pierre develop the above arguments, viewing
writing as a method of inquiry that moves
through successive stages of self-reflection. As
a series of written representations, the field-
worker’s texts flow from the field experience,
through intermediate works, to later work, and
Denzin & Lincoln: Introduction– 2–19
finally to the research text, which is the public
presentation of the ethnographic and narrative
experience. Thus fieldwork and writing blur into
one another. There is, in the final analysis, no
difference between writing and fieldwork. These
two perspectives inform one another throughout
every chapter in this volume. In these ways the
crisis of representation moves qualitative research
in new and critical directions.
A Triple Crisis
The ethnographer’s authority remains under
assault today (Behar, 1995, p. 3; Gupta & Ferguson,
1997, p. 16; Jackson, 1998; Ortner, 1997, p. 2). A
triple crisis of representation, legitimation, and
praxis confronts qualitative researchers in the
human disciplines. Embedded in the discourses
of poststructuralism and postmodernism (Vidich
& Lyman, 2000; see also Richardson & St. Pierre,
Chapter 38, this volume), these three crises are
coded in multiple terms, variously called and asso-
ciated with the critical, interpretive, linguistic, femi-
nist, and rhetorical turns in social theory. These
new turns make problematic two key assumptions
of qualitative research. The first is that qualitative
researchers can no longer directly capture lived
experience. Such experience, it is argued, is created
in the social text written by the researcher. This
is the representational crisis. It confronts the
inescapable problem of representation, but does so
within a framework that makes the direct link
between experience and text problematic.
The second assumption makes problematic
the traditional criteria for evaluating and inter-
preting qualitative research. This is the legitima-
tion crisis. It involves a serious rethinking of such
terms as validity, generalizability, and reliability,
terms already retheorized in postpositivist
(Hammersley, 1992), constructionist-naturalistic
(Guba & Lincoln, 1989, pp. 163–183), feminist
(Olesen, Chapter 10, this volume), interpretive
and performative (Denzin, 1997, 2003), post-
structural (Lather, 1993; Lather & Smithies,
1997), and critical discourses (Kincheloe &
McLaren, Chapter 12, this volume). This crisis
asks, How are qualitative studies to be evaluated
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in the contemporary, poststructural moment?
The first two crises shape the third, which asks,
Is it possible to effect change in the world if
society is only and always a text? Clearly these
crises intersect and blur, as do the answers to the
questions they generate (see Ladson-Billings,
2000; Schwandt, 2000; Smith & Deemer, 2000).
The fifth moment, the postmodern period of
experimental ethnographic writing, struggled to
make sense of these crises. New ways of compos-
ing ethnography were explored (Ellis & Bochner,
1996). Theories were read as tales from the
field. Writers struggled with different ways to
represent the “Other,” although they were now
joined by new representational concerns (Fine,
Weis, Weseen, & Wong, 2000; see also Fine &
Weis, Chapter 3, this volume). Epistemologies
from previously silenced groups emerged to offer
solutions to these problems. The concept of the
aloof observer was abandoned. More action,
participatory, and activist-oriented research was
on the horizon. The search for grand narratives
was being replaced by more local, small-scale
theories fitted to specific problems and specific
situations.
The sixth moment, postexperimental inquiry
(1995–2000), was a period of great excitement,
with AltaMira Press, under the direction of Mitch
Allen, taking the lead.AltaMira’s book series titled
Ethnographic Alternatives, for which Carolyn Ellis
and Arthur Bochner served as series editors,
captured this new excitement and brought a host
of new authors into the interpretive community.
The following description of the series from the
publisher reflects its experimental tone: “Ethno-
graphic Alternatives publishes experimental
forms of qualitative writing that blur the bound-
aries between social sciences and humanities.
Some volumes in the series . . . experiment with
novel forms of expressing lived experience,includ-
ing literary, poetic, autobiographical, multivoiced,
conversational, critical, visual, performative and
co-constructed representations.”
During this same period, two major new
qualitative journals began publication: Qualita-
tive Inquiry and Qualitative Research. The
editors of these journals were committed to
publishing the very best new work. The success
of these ventures framed the seventh moment,
what we are calling the methodologically con-
tested present (2000–2004). As discussed above,
this is a period of conflict, great tension, and, in
some quarters, retrenchment.
The eighth moment is now, the future (2005–).
In this moment scholars, as reviewed above, are
confronting the methodological backlash associ-
ated with “Bush science” and the evidence-based
social movement.
Reading History
We draw several conclusions from this brief
history, noting that it is, like all histories, some-
what arbitrary. First, each of the earlier historical
moments is still operating in the present, either
as legacy or as a set of practices that researchers
continue follow or argue against. The multiple
and fractured histories of qualitative research
now make it possible for any given researcher
to attach a project to a canonical text from any
of the above-described historical moments.
Multiple criteria of evaluation compete for atten-
tion in this field. Second, an embarrassment
of choices now characterizes the field of qualita-
tive research. Researchers have never before
had so many paradigms, strategies of inquiry,
and methods of analysis to draw upon and uti-
lize. Third, we are in a moment of discovery and
rediscovery, as new ways of looking, inter-
preting, arguing, and writing are debated and
discussed. Fourth, the qualitative research act
can no longer be viewed from within a neutral
or objective positivist perspective. Class, race,
gender, and ethnicity shape inquiry, making
research a multicultural process. Fifth, we are
clearly not implying a progress narrative with
our history. We are not saying that the cutting
edge is located in the present. We are saying
that the present is a politically charged space.
Complex pressures both within and outside of
the qualitative community are working to erase
the positive developments of the past 30 years.
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2 QUALITATIVE RESEARCH AS PROCESS
Three interconnected, generic activities define the
qualitative research process. They go by a variety
of different labels, including theory, analysis,
ontology, epistemology, and methodology. Behind
these terms stands the personal biography of the
researcher, who speaks from a particular class,
gender, racial, cultural, and ethnic community
perspective. The gendered, multiculturally situ-
ated researcher approaches the world with a set of
ideas, a framework (theory, ontology) that speci-
fies a set of questions (epistemology) that he or
she then examines in specific ways (methodology,
analysis).That is, the researcher collects empirical
materials bearing on the question and then ana-
lyzes and writes about those materials. Every
researcher speaks from within a distinct inter-
pretive community that configures, in its special
way, the multicultural, gendered components of
the research act.
In this volume we treat these generic activities
under five headings, or phases: the researcher and
the researched as multicultural subjects, major
paradigms and interpretive perspectives, research
strategies, methods of collecting and analyzing
empirical materials, and the art of interpretation.
Behind and within each of these phases stands
the biographically situated researcher. This indi-
vidual enters the research process from inside
an interpretive community. This community has
its own historical research traditions, which
constitute a distinct point of view. This perspec-
tive leads the researcher to adopt particular views
of the “Other” who is studied. At the same time,
the politics and the ethics of research must also
considered, for these concerns permeate every
phase of the research process.
2 THE OTHER AS RESEARCH SUBJECT
Since its early-20th-century birth in modern, inter-
pretive form, qualitative research has been haunted
by a double-faced ghost. On the one hand, qualita-
tive researchers have assumed that qualified,
Denzin & Lincoln: Introduction– 2–21
competent observers can, with objectivity, clarity,
and precision, report on their own observations
of the social world, including the experiences of
others.Second,researchers have held to the belief in
a real subject, or real individual, who is present in
the world and able,in some form,to report on his or
her experiences. So armed, researchers could blend
their own observations with the self-reports pro-
vided by subjects through interviews and life story,
personal experience, and case study documents.
These two beliefs have led qualitative
researchers across disciplines to seek a method
that will allow them to record accurately their
own observations while also uncovering the
meanings their subjects bring to their life expe-
riences. Such a method would rely on the subjec-
tive verbal and written expressions of meaning
given by the individuals studied as windows into
the inner lives of these persons. Since Dilthey
(1900/1976), this search for a method has led to
a perennial focus in the human disciplines on
qualitative, interpretive methods.
Recently, as noted above, this position and its
beliefs have come under assault. Poststructuralists
and postmodernists have contributed to the under-
standing that there is no clear window into the
inner life of an individual. Any gaze is always fil-
tered through the lenses of language, gender, social
class, race, and ethnicity. There are no objective
observations, only observations socially situated
in the worlds of—and between—the observer and
the observed. Subjects, or individuals, are seldom
able to give full explanations of their actions or
intentions; all they can offer are accounts,or stories,
about what they have done and why. No single
method can grasp all the subtle variations in ongo-
ing human experience. Consequently, qualitative
researchers deploy a wide range of interconnected
interpretive methods, always seeking better ways to
make more understandable the worlds of experi-
ence they have studied.
Table 1.1 depicts the relationships we see
among the five phases that define the research
process. Behind all but one of these phases stands
the biographically situated researcher. These five
levels of activity, or practice, work their way
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through the biography of the researcher. We take
them up briefly in order here; we discuss these
phases more fully in our introductions to the
individual parts of this volume.
Phase 1: The Researcher
Our remarks above indicate the depth and
complexity of the traditional and applied qualita-
tive research perspectives into which a socially
situated researcher enters. These traditions locate
the researcher in history, simultaneously guiding
and constraining the work that is done in any
specific study. This field has always been charac-
terized by diversity and conflict, and these are
its most enduring traditions (see Greenwood &
Levin, Chapter 2, this volume). As a carrier of this
complex and contradictory history, the researcher
must also confront the ethics and politics of
research (see in this volume Fine & Weis, Chapter
3; Smith, Chapter 4; Bishop, Chapter 5; Christians,
Chapter 6). Researching the native, the indige-
nous Other, while claiming to engage in value-free
inquiry for the human disciplines is over. Today
researchers struggle to develop situational and
transsituational ethics that apply to all forms of
the research act and its human-to-human rela-
tionships. We no longer have the option of defer-
ring the decolonization project.
Phase 2: Interpretive Paradigms
All qualitative researchers are philosophers
in that “universal sense in which all human
beings . . . are guided by highly abstract princi-
ples” (Bateson, 1972, p. 320). These principles
combine beliefs about ontology (What kind of
being is the human being? What is the nature of
reality?), epistemology (What is the relationship
between the inquirer and the known?), and
methodology (How do we know the world, or gain
knowledge of it?) (see Guba, 1990, p. 18; Lincoln &
Guba, 1985, pp. 14–15; see also Guba & Lincoln,
Chapter 8, this volume). These beliefs shape how
the qualitative researcher sees the world and acts
in it. The researcher is “bound within a net of
epistemological and ontological premises which—
regardless of ultimate truth or falsity—become
partially self-validating” (Bateson, 1972, p. 314).
The net that contains the researcher’s episte-
mological, ontological, and methodological
premises may be termed a paradigm, or an inter-
pretive framework, a “basic set of beliefs that
guides action” (Guba, 1990, p. 17). All research is
interpretive; it is guided by the researcher’s set of
beliefs and feelings about the world and how it
should be understood and studied. Some beliefs
may be taken for granted, invisible, only assumed,
whereas others are highly problematic and con-
troversial. Each interpretive paradigm makes
particular demands on the researcher, including
the questions the researcher asks and the inter-
pretations he or she brings to them.
At the most general level, four major interpre-
tive paradigms structure qualitative research:
positivist and postpositivist, constructivist-
interpretive, critical (Marxist, emancipatory),
and feminist-poststructural. These four abstract
paradigms become more complicated at the level
of concrete specific interpretive communities.
At this level it is possible to identify not only the
constructivist, but also multiple versions of femi-
nism (Afrocentric and poststructural)17 as well
as specific ethnic, Marxist, and cultural studies
paradigms. These perspectives, or paradigms,
are examined in Part II of this volume.
The paradigms examined in Part II work
against and alongside (and some within) the pos-
itivist and postpositivist models. They all work
within relativist ontologies (multiple constructed
realities), interpretive epistemologies (the knower
and known interact and shape one another), and
interpretive, naturalistic methods.
Table 1.2 presents these paradigms and their
assumptions, including their criteria for evaluat-
ing research, and the typical form that an inter-
pretive or theoretical statement assumes in each
paradigm.18 These paradigms are explored in
considerable detail in the chapters in Part II by
Guba and Lincoln (Chapter 8), Olesen (Chapter
10), Ladson-Billings and Donnor (Chapter 11),
Kincheloe and McLaren (Chapter 12), Saukko
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Denzin & Lincoln: Introduction– 2–23

Table 1.1. The Research Process

Phase 1: The Researcher as a Multicultural Subject

History and research traditions
Conceptions of self and the other
The ethics and politics of research

Phase 2: Theoretical Paradigms and Perspectives

Positivism, postpositivism
Interpretivism, constructivism, hermeneutics
Feminism(s)
Racialized discourses
Critical theory and Marxist models
Cultural studies models
Queer theory

Phase 3: Research Strategies

Design
Case study
Ethnography, participant observation, performance ethnography
Phenomenology, ethnomethodology
Grounded theory
Life history, testimonio
Historical method
Action and applied research
Clinical research

Phase 4: Methods of Collection and Analysis

Interviewing
Observing
Artifacts, documents, and records
Visual methods
Autoethnography
Data management methods
Computer-assisted analysis
Textual analysis
Focus groups
Applied ethnography

Phase 5: The Art, Practices, and Politics of Interpretation and Evaluation

Criteria for judging adequacy
Practices and politics of interpretation
Writing as interpretation
Policy analysis
Evaluation traditions
Applied research
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24– 2– HANDBOOK OF QUALITATIVE RESEARCH—CHAPTER 1

Table 1.2. Interpretive Paradigms

Paradigm/Theory Criteria Form of Theory Type of Narration

Positivist/ Internal, external validity Logical-deductive, Scientific report
postpositivist grounded
Constructivist Trustworthiness, credibility, Substantive-formal Interpretive case
transferability, confirmability studies, ethnographic
fiction
Feminist Afrocentric, lived experience, dialogue, Critical, standpoint Essays, stories,
caring, accountability, race, class, experimental writing
gender, reflexivity, praxis, emotion,
concrete grounding
Ethnic Afrocentric, lived experience, dialogue, Standpoint, critical, Essays, fables, dramas
caring, accountability, race, class, gender historical
Marxist Emancipatory theory, falsifiable, Critical, historical, Historical, economic,
dialogical, race, class, gender economic sociocultural analyses
Cultural studies Cultural practices, praxis, social texts, Social criticism Cultural theory-as
subjectivities criticism
Queer theory: Reflexivity, deconstruction Social criticism, Theory as criticism,
historical analysis autobiography

(Chapter 13), and Plummer (Chapter 14). We
have discussed the positivist and postpositivist
paradigms above. They work from within a realist
and critical realist ontology and objective episte-
mologies, and they rely on experimental, quasi-
experimental, survey, and rigorously defined
qualitative methodologies. Ryan and Bernard
(2000) have developed elements of this paradigm.
The constructivist paradigm assumes a rela-
tivist ontology (there are multiple realities), a
subjectivist epistemology (knower and respon-
dent cocreate understandings), and a naturalistic
(in the natural world) set of methodological pro-
cedures. Findings are usually presented in terms
of the criteria of grounded theory or pattern
theories (see in this volume Guba & Lincoln,
Chapter 8; Charmaz, Chapter 20; see also Ryan
and Bernard, 2000). Terms such as credibility,
transferability, dependability, and confirmability
replace the usual positivist criteria of internal and
external validity, reliability, and objectivity.
Feminist, ethnic, Marxist, cultural studies,
and queer theory models privilege a materialist-
realist ontology; that is, the real world makes a
material difference in terms of race, class, and
gender. Subjectivist epistemologies and natural-
istic methodologies (usually ethnographies) are
also employed. Empirical materials and theoreti-
cal arguments are evaluated in terms of their
emancipatory implications. Criteria from gender
and racial communities (e.g., African American)
may be applied (emotionality and feeling, caring,
personal accountability, dialogue).
Poststructural feminist theories emphasize
problems with the social text, its logic, and its
inability ever to represent the world of lived expe-
rience fully. Positivist and postpositivist criteria of
evaluation are replaced by other criteria, including
the reflexive, multivoiced text that is grounded in
the experiences of oppressed peoples.
The cultural studies and queer theory para-
digms are multifocused, with many different
01-Denzin.qxd 2/7/2005 9:20 PM Page 25
strands drawing from Marxism, feminism, and
the postmodern sensibility (see in this volume
Saukko, Chapter 13; Plummer, Chapter 14;
Richardson and St. Pierre, Chapter 38). There is a
tension between a humanistic cultural studies,
which stresses lived experiences (meaning), and a
more structural cultural studies project, which
stresses the structural and material determinants
(race, class, gender) and effects of experience. Of
course, there are two sides to every coin, and both
sides are needed—indeed, both are critical. The
cultural studies and queer theory paradigms use
methods strategically—that is, as resources for
understanding and for producing resistances to
local structures of domination. Scholars may do
close textual readings and discourse analyses of
cultural texts (see in this volume Olesen, Chapter
10; Saukko, Chapter 13; Chase, Chapter 25) as well
as local, online, reflexive and critical ethnogra-
phies, open-ended interviewing, and participant
observation. The focus is on how race, class, and
gender are produced and enacted in historically
specific situations.
Paradigm and personal history in hand,
focused on a concrete empirical problem to
examine, the researcher now moves to the next
stage of the research process—namely, working
with a specific strategy of inquiry.
Phase 3: Strategies of Inquiry
and Interpretive Paradigms
Table 1.1 presents some of the major strategies
of inquiry a researcher may use. Phase 3 begins
with research design, which, broadly conceived,
involves a clear focus on the research question,
the purposes of the study, “what information
most appropriately will answer specific research
questions, and which strategies are most effective
for obtaining it”(LeCompte & Preissle, 1993, p. 30;
see also Cheek, Chapter 15, this volume). A
research design describes a flexible set of guide-
lines that connect theoretical paradigms first to
strategies of inquiry and second to methods for
collecting empirical materials. A research design
situates the researcher in the empirical world and
Denzin & Lincoln: Introduction– 2–25
connects him or her to specific sites, persons,
groups, institutions, and bodies of relevant
interpretive material, including documents and
archives. A research design also specifies how the
investigator will address the two critical issues of
representation and legitimation.
A strategy of inquiry comprises a bundle of
skills, assumptions, and practices that the
researcher employs as he or she moves from
paradigm to the empirical world. Strategies of
inquiry put paradigms of interpretation into
motion. At the same time, strategies of inquiry
also connect the researcher to specific methods of
collecting and analyzing empirical materials. For
example, the case study strategy relies on inter-
viewing, observing, and document analysis.
Research strategies implement and anchor para-
digms in specific empirical sites or in specific
methodological practices, such as making a case
an object of study. These strategies include the
case study, phenomenological and ethnomethod-
ological techniques, and the use of grounded
theory, as well as biographical, autoethnographic,
historical, action, and clinical methods. Each of
these strategies is connected to a complex litera-
ture, and each has a separate history, exemplary
works, and preferred ways of putting the strategy
into motion.
Phase 4: Methods of Collecting
and Analyzing Empirical Materials
Qualitative researchers employ several meth-
ods for collecting empirical materials.19 These
methods, which are taken up in Part IV of this
volume, include interviewing; direct observation;
the analysis of artifacts, documents, and cultural
records; the use of visual materials; and the use
of personal experience. The researcher may also
read and analyze interviews or cultural texts in a
variety of different ways, including content, narra-
tive, and semiotic strategies. Faced with large
amounts of qualitative materials, the investigator
seeks ways of managing and interpreting these
documents, and here data management methods
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26– 2– HANDBOOK OF QUALITATIVE RESEARCH—CHAPTER 1
and computer-assisted models of analysis may be
of use.
Phase 5: The Art and Politics of
Interpretation and Evaluation
Qualitative research is endlessly creative and
interpretive. The researcher does not just leave
the field with mountains of empirical materials
and then easily write up his or her findings.
Qualitative interpretations are constructed. The
researcher first creates a field text consisting of
field notes and documents from the field, what
Roger Sanjek (1990, p. 386) calls “indexing” and
David Plath (1990, p. 374) calls “filework.” The
writer-as-interpreter moves from this text to a
research text: notes and interpretations based on
the field text. This text is then re-created as a
working interpretive document that contains the
writer’s initial attempts to make sense of what he
or she has learned. Finally, the writer produces
the public text that comes to the reader. This final
tale from the field may assume several forms:
confessional, realist, impressionistic, critical, for-
mal, literary, analytic, grounded theory, and so on
(see Van Maanen, 1988).
The interpretive practice of making sense of
one’s findings is both artistic and political.Multiple
criteria for evaluating qualitative research now
exist, and those that we emphasize stress the situ-
ated,relational,and textual structures of the ethno-
graphic experience. There is no single interpretive
truth.As we argued earlier,there are multiple inter-
pretive communities, each with its own criteria for
evaluating interpretations.
Program evaluation is a major site of qualita-
tive research, and qualitative researchers can
influence social policy in important ways. The
chapters in this volume by Greenwood and Levin
(Chapter 2), McTaggart and Kemmis (Chapter
23), Miller and Crabtree (Chapter 24), Tedlock
(Chapter 18), Smith and Hodkinson (Chapter 36),
and House (Chapter 42) trace and discuss the
rich history of applied qualitative research in
the social sciences. This is the critical site where
theory, method, praxis, action, and policy all
come together. Qualitative researchers can isolate
target populations, show the immediate effects of
certain programs on such groups, and isolate the
constraints that operate against policy changes
in such settings. Action-oriented and clinically
oriented qualitative researchers can also create
spaces where those who are studied (the Other)
can speak. The evaluator becomes the conduit for
making such voices heard.
2 BRIDGING THE HISTORICAL
MOMENTS: WHAT COMES NEXT?
In Chapter 38 of this volume, Richardson and
St. Pierre argue that we are already in the
post-“post” period—post-poststructuralism,
post-postmodernism, post-postexperimentalism.
What this means for interpretive ethnographic
practices is still not clear, but it is certain that
things will never again be the same. We are in
a new age where messy, uncertain, multivoiced
texts, cultural criticism, and new experimental
works will become more common, as will more
reflexive forms of fieldwork, analysis, and inter-
textual representation. The subject of our final
essay in this volume is these sixth, seventh,
eighth, and ninth moments. It is true that, as the
poet said, the center no longer holds. We can
reflect on what should be at the new center.
Thus we come full circle. Returning to our
bridge metaphor, the chapters that follow take the
researcher back and forth through every phase of
the research act. Like a good bridge, the chapters
provide for two-way traffic, coming and going
between moments, formations, and interpretive
communities. Each chapter examines the relevant
histories, controversies, and current practices that
are associated with each paradigm, strategy, and
method. Each chapter also offers projections for
the future, where a specific paradigm, strategy, or
method will be 10 years from now, deep into the
formative years of the 21st century.
In reading the chapters that follow, it is
important to remember that the field of qualita-
tive research is defined by a series of tensions,
01-Denzin.qxd 2/7/2005 9:20 PM Page 27
contradictions, and hesitations. These tensions
work back and forth between and among the
broad, doubting postmodern sensibility; the
more certain, more traditional positivist, post-
positivist, and naturalistic conceptions of this
project; and an increasingly conservative,
neoliberal global environment. All of the chap-
ters that follow are caught in and articulate these
tensions.
2 NOTES
1. Recall bell hooks’s (1990, p. 127) reading of the
famous photo of Stephen Tyler doing fieldwork in India
that appears on the cover of Writing Culture (Clifford &
Marcus, 1986), In the picture, Tyler is seated at some
distance from three dark-skinned persons. One, a child,
is poking his or her head out of a basket. A woman is
hidden in the shadows of the hut. A man, a checkered
white-and-black shawl across his shoulder, elbow
propped on his knee, hand resting along the side of his
face, is staring at Tyler. Tyler is writing in a field journal.
A piece of white cloth is attached to his glasses, perhaps
shielding him from the sun. This patch of whiteness
marks Tyler as the white male writer studying these
passive brown and black persons. Indeed, the brown
male’s gaze signals some desire, or some attachment to
Tyler. In contrast, the female’s gaze is completely hidden
by the shadows and by the words of the book’s title,
which are printed across her face.
2. Qualitative research has separate and distin-
guished histories in education, social work, communi-
cations, psychology, history, organizational studies,
medical science, anthropology, and sociology.
3. Some definitions are in order here. Positivism
asserts that objective accounts of the real world can be
given. Postpositivism holds that only partially objective
accounts of the world can be produced, for all methods
for examining such accounts are flawed. According to
foundationalism, we can have an ultimate grounding
for our knowledge claims about the world, and this
involves the use of empiricist and positivist episte-
mologies (Schwandt, 1997a, p. 103). Nonfoundational-
ism holds that we can make statements about the world
without “recourse to ultimate proof or foundations
for that knowing” (Schwandt, 1997a, p. 102). Quasi-
foundationalism holds that we can make certain
knowledge claims about the world based on neorealist
Denzin & Lincoln: Introduction– 2–27
criteria, including the correspondence concept of truth;
there is an independent reality that can be mapped (see
Smith & Hodkinson, Chapter 36, this volume).
4. Jameson (1991, pp. 3–4) reminds us that any
periodization hypothesis is always suspect, even one
that rejects linear, stagelike models. It is never clear to
what reality a stage refers, and what divides one stage
from another is always debatable. Our eight moments
are meant to mark discernible shifts in style, genre,
epistemology, ethics, politics, and aesthetics.
5. Several scholars have termed this model a
progress narrative (Alasuutari, 2004, pp. 599–600; Seale
et al., 2004, p. 2). Critics assert that we believe that
the most recent moment is the most up-to-date, the
avant-garde, the cutting edge (Alasuutari, 2004,
p. 601). Naturally, we dispute this reading. Teddlie and
Tashakkori (2003, pp. 5–8) have modified our histori-
cal periods to fit their historical analysis of the major
moments in the emergence of the use of mixed meth-
ods in social science research in the past century.
6. Some additional definitions are needed here.
Structuralism holds that any system is made up of a
set of oppositional categories embedded in language.
Semiotics is the science of signs or sign systems—a
structuralist project. According to poststructuralism,
language is an unstable system of referents, thus it is
impossible ever to capture completely the meaning of
an action, text, or intention. Postmodernism is a con-
temporary sensibility, developing since World War II,
that privileges no single authority, method, or para-
digm. Hermeneutics is an approach to the analysis of
texts that stresses how prior understandings and prej-
udices shape the interpretive process. Phenomenology
is a complex system of ideas associated with the works
of Husserl, Heidegger, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, and
Alfred Schutz. Cultural studies is a complex, interdisci-
plinary field that merges critical theory, feminism, and
poststructuralism.
7. Of course, all settings are natural—that is,
places were everyday experiences take place. Qualitative
researchers study people doing things together in the
places where these things are done (Becker,1986).There
is no field site or natural place where one goes to do this
kind of work (see also Gupta & Ferguson, 1997, p. 8).
The site is constituted through the researcher’s interpre-
tive practices. Historically, analysts have distinguished
between experimental (laboratory) and field (natural)
research settings, hence the argument that qualitative
research is naturalistic. Activity theory erases this dis-
tinction (Keller & Keller, 1996, p. 20; Vygotsky, 1978).
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28– 2– HANDBOOK OF QUALITATIVE RESEARCH—CHAPTER 1
8. According to Weinstein and Weinstein (1991),
“The meaning of bricoleur in French popular speech is
‘someone who works with his (or her) hands and uses
devious means compared to those of the crafts-
man.’ . . . the bricoleur is practical and gets the job
done” (p. 161). These authors provide a history of the
term, connecting it to the works of the German sociol-
ogist and social theorist Georg Simmel and, by impli-
cation, Baudelaire. Hammersley (1999) disputes our
use of this term. Following Lévi-Strauss, he reads the
bricoleur as a mythmaker. He suggests that the term
be replaced with the notion of the boatbuilder.
Hammersley also quarrels with our “moments” model
of the history of qualitative research, contending that it
implies some sense of progress.
9. Brian De Palma reproduced this baby carriage
scene in his 1987 film The Untouchables.
10. In the harbor, the muzzles of the Potemkin’s
two huge guns swing slowly toward the camera. Words
on the screen inform us, “The brutal military power
answered by guns of the battleship.” A final famous
three-shot montage sequence shows first a sculpture of
a sleeping lion, then a lion rising from his sleep, and
finally the lion roaring, symbolizing the rage of the
Russian people (Cook, 1981, p. 167). In this sequence
Eisenstein uses montage to expand time, creating a
psychological duration for this horrible event. By draw-
ing out this sequence, by showing the baby in the car-
riage,the soldiers firing on the citizens,the blood on the
mother’s glove, the descending carriage on the steps, he
suggests a level of destruction of great magnitude.
11. Here it is relevant to make a distinction
between techniques that are used across disciplines
and methods that are used within disciplines.
Ethnomethodologists, for example, employ their
approach as a method, whereas others selectively bor-
row that method as a technique for their own applica-
tions. Harry Wolcott (personal communication, 1993)
suggests this distinction. It is also relevant to make dis-
tinctions among topic, method, and resource. Methods
can be studied as topics of inquiry; that is how a case
study gets done. In this ironic, ethnomethodological
sense, method is both a resource and a topic of inquiry.
12. Indeed, any attempt to give an essential defini-
tion of qualitative research requires a qualitative analy-
sis of the circumstances that produce such a definition.
13. In this sense all research is qualitative, because
“the observer is at the center of the research process”
(Vidich & Lyman, 2000, p. 39).
14. See Lincoln and Guba (1985) for an extension
and elaboration of this tradition in the mid-1980s, and
for more recent extensions see Taylor and Bogdan
(1998) and Creswell (1998).
15. Greenblatt (1997, pp. 15–18) offers a useful
deconstructive reading of the many meanings and
practices Geertz brings to the term thick description.
16. These works marginalized and minimized the
contributions of standpoint feminist theory and
research to this discourse (see Behar,1995,p.3; Gordon,
1995, p. 432).
17. Olesen (Chapter 10, this volume) identifies
three strands of feminist research: mainstream empir-
ical, standpoint and cultural studies, and poststruc-
tural, postmodern. She places Afrocentric and other
models of color under the cultural studies and post-
modern categories.
18. These, of course, are our interpretations of
these paradigms and interpretive styles.
19. Empirical materials is the preferred term for
what traditionally have been described as data.
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